Holly Throsby’s What I Thought Of You by Yanni Kronenberg

David Knight - 4th Mar 2011

A worldwide Super 8 collaboration for Australian singer-songwriter Holly Throsby's What I Thought Of You, directed by Yanni Kronenberg and filmed by twenty people in Australia, America, Canada, The United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Greece, Iceland, Ukraine, Sweden and Brazil - between 1974 and 2011.

"Lately I've been getting a bit obsessed with watching unedited Super 8 footage that filmmakers upload to Vimeo or Youtube," says Yanni, who co-directed of the wonderful Autumn Story video for Firekites a couple of years ago. "Super 8 has a lovely lo-fi, dreamy aesthetic in contrast to all the high resolution projects that are being made with Canon 5Ds and higher end cameras. I thought there was a nice link between Holly's song and the degraded image quality and nostalgia of archival Super 8.

"I searched Vimeo for people who were shooting on Super 8 and we asked them if they wanted to be involved in the video. We pitched it as a sort of worldwide collaboration. I wanted to find footage that related to key images in the lyrics, but wasn't overly literal. People sent me their footage and I used little sections from each person. Some of the footage originated as camera or stock tests, some were experimental short films and some domestic home movies.

"Holly and I also put the word out to our friends and other filmmakers in Australia that we needed super 8 footage for a video, and some people came forward, mainly with home movie footage. Once footage started to come in, I also shot Holly on a Canon 5D, and incorporated it into the super 8."